The Flint You Don't Reach For
A bit of Everything
If you are a listener of my podcast, Inner Work, Outer World, you are familiar with my habit of beginning almost every episode by asking you a question. My question here is to imagine that somebody asks you what you do. Not "what's your job?" What you do. And there's a real answer. One you actually know. What comes out instead is much smaller than that. Vaguer than that. "Oh, a bit of everything." True, technically. Also, the fastest way out of a conversation you didn't want to be in in the first place.
You know that unique kind of quiet that falls over a room right after someone looks at you and really means it? Not looking at you in an admiring way. Not needing something from you. Just looking and waiting — like they expect you to still be there when they're done looking. Most of us, including myself, don't quite know what to do with that layer of quiet.
A Task, and No Task
There is a true difference between the experience of being needed and being seen. Being needed almost always comes with a task of some sort. It typically means someone hands you a problem, and you know exactly what to do with either your hands, your attention, or your competence. Being seen hands you nothing at all. It asks you to stay in the room empty-handed while someone looks. If you've spent much of your life being a person others come to regularly — the steady one, the useful one, the person who appears from the outside to have it all together — chances are being seen by another is a much harder ask than being needed. Being needed, you can do in your sleep. Being seen asks an entirely different capacity of you.
What my Father didn’t do
A memory came to me while considering the topic at hand. When I was a teenager, I got my first flat tire. I called my dad, expecting him to swoop in with a rescue — a jack, a lug wrench, the whole nine yards. Instead, he drove out, parked his car behind mine, got out, and just stood there watching. He did not touch the tire once. I remember being annoyed about it at the time, thinking, "You're just going to stand there?" While I clumsily figured out which way the lug nuts turned, I realized he wasn't going to do it for me, but he also wasn't going to leave. He was just going to be the person standing there while I found out I could do it myself.
The Lantern that went out & not reaching for the Flint
In this week's episode of Inner Work, Outer World, Finnegan, the fox at the center of the stories, relights every lantern in the forest before anyone else notices the forest has gone dark. Finnegan comes to a young fox kit's door to do what he always does. Except tonight, he does something different. He sits down. He keeps his own flint in his own pocket. He waits while the kit strikes its own light, badly, twice, before it catches. What he says when it finally does — "That one's yours now" — is the whole episode in four impactful words. You can hear the full story in this week's episode, on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
My teenage self didn't have language for this. Now I do. That's the whole episode — years before there was a fox, or a lantern, or a podcast at all.
Listen to the episode:
